A federal appeals panel Tuesday began considering whether an Ohio morgue attendant's sexual abuse of three female corpses amounts to constitutional rights violations by the man's bosses and whether a lawsuit against them should go to trial.

Relatives of the three women sued the morgue attendant's two bosses and Hamilton County in 2010, alleging they acted with deliberate indifference to the safety of bodies in the morgue. The family members are seeking unspecified damages.

Last year, a federal judge threw out some of their claims while allowing others to stand, leading both sides to appeal and the case to land in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. The court will rule at a later unspecified date.

Attorneys for the county and the two bosses argue that no one could have ever anticipated that morgue attendant Kenneth Douglas would sexually abuse the corpses, even though there's evidence they knew he was an alcoholic and had received a report from his wife that he was coming home from work drunk and smelling of sex.

Douglas, 60, who was sentenced to six years in prison after pleading guilty to gross abuse of a corpse, was released from prison earlier this year and is living in Cincinnati, records show. His number was unlisted.

Douglas testified that he was drunk and high on cocaine when he had intercourse with the bodies of Karen Sue Range, 19, who was stabbed to death in 1982; Charlene Appling, 23, a pregnant single mother who was strangled in 1991; and Angel Hicks, 24, a mother of a 1- and a 3-year-old. Hicks died of head injuries after being pushed out of a third-story window in 1991.

Antronette Shirley, Hicks' older sister, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that learning about the sexual abuse of her sister 17 years after her killing is a constant torment.

"I imagine Kenneth Douglas pulling her out of a freezer, climbing on top of her just like he said and having sex with her," she said through tears. "This will creep up in my mind until the day I die."

She said the court fight isn't about money, but what's right.

"It's about justice for my sister because she can't talk for herself," Shirley said. "No one was there to help her."

The sex abuse was discovered in 2008 after authorities conducted DNA testing on Range's body following a court appeal involving a man convicted in her death; semen in her body was a match for Douglas.

Douglas, a married father of four, worked for the coroner's office between 1976 and 1992 and served in the military as a pallbearer and rifleman for soldiers killed in the Vietnam War, according to court records.

The families of three slain women have sued Hamilton County over revelations that their deceased loved ones were sexually abused at the Hamilton County morgue.
Read: Complaint Filed In Morgue Lawsuit |
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